The Best Job Title Ever

Bear With Me, This One Skates Around A Bit
Okay, so I was entertaining myself by listening to r/AskReddit about "What made a lot of people quit at once?", and someone was talking about working in a mine where there weren't any effective "Safety Boxes", which appear to be emergency shelters.  Art?


     Then they say Mine Rescue was discontinued, by which they meant the emergency response team who venture into mines if there has been any kind of catastrophe.  This was all in order to save money, of course, and it resulted in a lot of the workforce abruptly quitting.  Mention was made of "Geotechnical engineers", who stated that the mine was unsafe (management disagreed).
     Now, you know Conrad.  Ever-inquisitive, which is to say nosy, and so I decided to check up on that fount of all knowledge, Wiki, to see what a Geotechnical Engineer is and what they do.
     Well, it's their job to predict how soil and rock will behave in the context of human engineering projects, such as bridges or dams or motorways.  

Or the London Crossrail project

     The GEs are the people who sample and investigate proposed sites to determine what is and isn't safe or feasible, and if they say that a mine is unsafe, it's unsafe.
     Now we come to the meat of the matter: that job title.  Geotechnical Engineering involves the fields of both Soil Mechanics and <waiforitwaitforit> ROCK MECHANICS.  Isn't that the best ever title*?  In fact, I used to know someone on a forum many years ago - possibly The Agony Booth when it still had a forum - who used the job title as their handle.  Of course they downplayed how awesome it is, because they didn't want to come across as boastful, but we both knew the truth.

The Vajont Dam

     We've covered this disaster before, where half a mountainside slid into the dam's retained waters, causing the entire volume of water to flood out and kill 2,000 people downstream.  This is what happens when you ignore or silence your geotechnical engineers, people.

A rock salmon

     Okay, motley, shall we go outside and break some rocks in the hard sun?  Hmmm.  You know, I'd swear that would make a good line in a song.

Back To Generic Book Covers
Thank you Auntie Beeb for helping to generate content.  We've covered the Airport Potboiling Thriller, the Heavy Literary Tome and Tolkein Knock-Off Fantasy.  Let us now examine another stereotype, that of Books For Girls.  Art?

Sic

     Just as the Airport Potboiling Thriller has to have a broody-looking man walking away with his back to you, the reader, so too does a book for girls have to have a girl on the cover.  It's announcing itself as being for girls, explicitly, so no nasty grubby sweaty boys dare pick it up, let alone read it.  I mean, what self-respecting male would be seen carrying around a book with a picture of a girl on the cover?  Oh and the BBC does back up their assertion with examples.  Art?

Sicker

     It seems to be another unwritten rule that said female's hair has to be up in a bun.  Conrad is unsure why this is so, but then again female hair is an utter mystery to him.

Bean-Counting And Hair-Splitting Pedantry
For Yes!  we are back with the ubiquitous James Holland and "The Battle of Britain", which he wrote.  I didn't just pick a name at random, you know.
     Anyways, we are back to statistics.  That, and paratroops.  The Teuton invasion of France and the Low Countries made extensive use of paratroops dropped from aircraft, which was almost the first time this had been done in wartime.  It made Perfidious Albion distinctly nervous after the fall of France, because there was a fear of ten thousand paratroopers making a descent on the fields of Kent and being ungentlemanly with guns.  Art?

Sic

     Wellllllllllll no.  Nope.  As Jim points out, on the opening day of the offensive, the Luftwaffe lost 244 Ju52s and gliders.  That's in ONE DAY.  This is typical of the Teuton "Bewegungskrieg" where losses are high but the campaigns are of short duration, so overall losses are reasonable.
     Jim also points out that, for all the fanfare and propaganda about ruthless Teuton efficiency, they were running a very slack peacetime economy.  Perfidious Albion, however, had immediately gone onto a war-time footing and was busy outproducing their enemy in aircraft.
     As an example, the Luftwaffe was only supplied with 24 new Ju52s per month.  So, to make good the losses of 10th May 1940 would have taken until March 1941; ten months to make up a single day's losses is ludicrous, yet that's what Teuton production priority meant.

One of the 244

     As for that airborne armada of invasion?  Forget it.  The capacity of the "Tante Ju" was between 12 and 13 paratroopers.  Let us say 12, because the extra space is taken up with extra supplies, since invading This Sceptred Isle is a big risky and you don't want to run out of ammunition or Schnapps.  You would therefore need 833 Ju52s to carry this invasion force, which is where we run into production bottlenecks, because at the rate of 24 aircraft being produced per month, it will take you nearly 3 YEARS to build this invasion transport fleet.  In fact, by the time it's ready, the Allies will be landing in Normandy on D-Day.
     There you go, pedantic hair-splittery of the finest calibre!

Another Oops! moment

"Balustrade"
Another of those words that happen to pop up in my mind from time to time, without any apparent reason.  According to my Collins Concise, it is a "set of ornamental railings with support from balusters."  Art?

Sic

     This, of course, begs the question as to what "Balusters" are.  Well, again according to my Collins Concise, they are a set of posts that support an ornamental rail or coping, and the word comes from the French "Balustre", which in turn comes from the Italian "Balaustro" meaning a pillar shaped like a pomegranate flower - "Italian" here seems like a cipher for "Latin", frankly.  Art?

Pomegranate flowers

     One can see the vague resemblance.

     And with that, we are done!


*  Or is it just me?